Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is the dark underbelly of education/academia. Selling worthless dreams to young people on credit. If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country, we’d give the education industry the scrutiny and malign it deserves. (We go after pawn shops and pay day lenders but at least they provide valuable liquidity.)

And there is also an oft-missed social justice aspect to all this. Professors and teachers are disproportionately white (and by definition, college-educated): https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. We sell education as a way to overcome the legacy of systematic oppression of certain minority groups, but we are actually creating quite a large wealth transfer from disadvantaged minorities to college-educated white people. And members of these minority groups aren't seeing the pay-off from paying their tithes to the educational establishment. As the author notes in the article:

> A 2014 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research revealed that an incredible 55.9 percent of black recent college graduates were “underemployed” and working in a position that didn’t require a four-year college degree.

The worst are expensive "professional" master's degree programs in careers that seem like they'd be very promising in terms of job opportunities at first glance: public health, public administration, biotechnology, legal interpreting, etc. I'm afraid that many grad programs in data science have the potential to join this group.

They all seem like "responsible" careers that someone worried about making a living could turn to. And then these graduate programs make expensive and misleading glossy brochures and web sites to entice students into a career where jobs are plentiful and well-paid.

Well, you can turn those programs into a decent job, but you have to play your cards just right. You have to choose the exact subfield that is hot right now, and pick up skills that aren't necessarily taught at the grad program. And you have to get into the exact right internship, or get lucky enough to snag one of the dwindling number of government jobs in your field. But no one at these schools bothers to tell the students these things. So in the end, relatively few graduates end up working in the field they studied.

But they do keep the $50,000-100,000 in debt they accumulated.

Perhaps we should align incentives. A good start is to make it so that education loan payments are only required on higher paying jobs and the payment increases progressively (like taxes).

It would be great if loan payments couldn't exceed some percentage of income for example 10%. If it exceeds 10% of your current monthly income you pay just 10% and rest is written off. If you are unemployed, you pay nothing and have the capital you owe reduced by the full payment.

This would quickly defund useless education.

Hmm, yeah. When I think about it, these things will probably end up with a system as complicated as (or more complicated than) taxes. Can you imagine? Someone studies Mathematics and then makes money primarily through capital gains, or they get inheritances, or they sell their home after studying to be a carpenter and fix up their house. The complexities are huge.

Sure. There will be people that will get undeserved benefit. But this idea is not about perfect justice. It's about aligning incentives so that financial institutions don't fund expensive degree's that will get you janitorial job or no job at all.

Currently student loans are pretty much no risk at all. You can even shake them off with bankruptcy.

Uh, only if you’re disabled.

> And you have to get into the exact right internship, or get lucky enough to snag one of the dwindling number of government jobs in your field.

There aren't a dwindling number of government jobs in public administration or public health.

> But no one at these schools bothers to tell the students these things.

Several schools' in those fields big draw is their internship/fellowship programs and connections to key employers in the public or private sector, and these things are heavily marketed as important.

> So in the end, relatively few graduates end up working in the field they studied.

A number of professional degrees are competitive advantage in related and even distant fields as well as their exact field, so that's not a sign of not getting a significant career advantage from the degree.

Columbia? Sure. Tulane or Wash U? Uhhhhh...

Yes. I read this story and said this about it: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/12/14/links-the-academic-indust...:

“I had pushed for a college education, believing that with it came job security and the freedom to pursue my writing without the burden of poverty.” Another person lied to by the academic industrial complex. The problem is, the world is awash in “writing.” Just “writing” is not a lucrative field. There is a lot of this: “applied to art grants and startup-accelerator programs, and even joined an innovative female-owned co-working space, Splash Coworking” and “I had to host a 12-hour poetry reading to raise money on GoFundMe,” but there is a distinct shortage of “I took an operating system course, which finally taught me how to master pointers and prevent memory leaks.”

It’s an ugly truth that writing is a leisurely art, historically only endeavored by aristocracy. Like most aristic pursuits, it’s not intended to be a meal-ticket. Great art is timeless, with its humanistic fulfillment being priceless.

> If we didn’t have a perverse glorification of education in this country

Is this true? I suspect large swathes of this country detest education. Nobody seems to be voting for better funding of schools - hell look at Oklahoma where school is only open 4 days a week. And that's an entire state!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/with-state-bu...

While there are certainly people that champion education in this country, there are many that condemn it.

We outspend almost everyone else on education: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-glob... Our post-secondary education spending (college and above) is the highest in the world, and 80% higher than the OECD average.

Oklahoma spends about $8,000 per student per year on K-12 education. If it were a country, it would fall between Italy and Spain on that statistic.

The expenditure is there but if you look into the spending you'll find corruption and adminstrative pay is bleeding the system dry. You have school systems where the adminstrative staff keeps getting pay raises while taxe income and teacher pay doesn't grow.

You also have school systems like mine where they blew the budget on building a new school that the contractor built fraudently(stuff like the radiators in classrooms being just covers with no actual radiator underneath). It just so happens that the contractor who built the school is friends/family with members of the school board so I guess it's no paper for homework that year and the contractor doesn't get sued.

We let far too much of our school system just be raided by private interests which is how you see us spend more money than similar countries, while barely able to run some schools

As the article I linked to points out, teacher pay in the U.S. is substantially above the OECD average.

> We let far too much of our school system just be raided by private interests

Right. "Private interests" are to blame, even though school systems are run by public employees top to bottom (from the principal to the janitor). Education in Sweden and Denmark must be a real disaster, given that in those countries school-choice programs allow parents to use voucher dollars on private schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Sweden ; http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/27820....

When a public employee like a superintendent, oks a contract for their family to bilk the school system, I think we could safely call that a private interest even though the superintendent is pulling a public salary.

Edit: your first link has an extra semicolon at the end I think. I will read these articles but it will take some time

> Professors and teachers are disproportionately white

According to [0], whites make up between 68% and 81% of the US population in the 25-64 age groups, and, according to your link, 76% of academics. In the same age group, Asians are 5.8-4.1% of the population, yet 10% of academics.

That makes whites over-represented by at most 76/68 = 1.12, so 12%, while Asians are over-represented by at least 10/5.8 = 1.72, so 72%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

At the K-12 level, over 80% of teachers/administrators are non-hispanic white, but just 50% of students: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/.... 58% of college students are non-hispanic white, but 82% of tenured/tenure-track professors, and 86% of administrators: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/02/racial-gap-am....

> At the K-12 level, over 80% of teachers/administrators are non-hispanic white, but just 50% of students

Just 50%? So 1% less, and they will be a minority in their age group?

I live and work in New Orleans at an expensive private university. This phenomenon of TFA people coming in and buying houses if they stick around while the locals can’t is going to have some serious backlash at some point.

I will admit that my engineering degree was fantastic. Learned math at a level that allows me to do pretty much anything.

However, this isnt true for every engineer, every degree, or every college. And- Did I really need to pay 40k to learn math really well?

My engineering job + coworkers were significantly better than college as far as increasing my ability to be an engineer.

Even one of the most valuable degrees, I'm starting to become skeptical of its value.

Yes, if you are good enough, you do not need a college degree.

Good enough is somewhere between the skills of a skilled college graduate and someone like George Hotz, the hacker who jail broke the iPhone and read the latest AI/ML papers to start his own self-driving car project.

For the rest of us, an engineering college degree signals that we made it through the accreditation gauntlet.

The professional organizations control the accreditation. Medical school enrollment is strictly limited by the number of residency spots which are funded by the US government. The AMA controls the former, as it could easily expand the supply to lower the direct costs.

An argument can be made that a MIT ChemE degree is more difficult to obtain than one from Cal State Poly. However, as long as each school is accredited by ABET, there is a baseline level of knowledge that each graduate of the ChemE program in any ABET-accredited school should obtain.

Software engineering is a term I personally hate, as there is no way to engineer software like a bridge. No standards, no stable technology.

There are two different questions here:

1. "Does an education really need to cost so much?"

2. "Do I really need an education?"

The answer to #1 I can't answer. I would be inclined to cut certain things like athletics and student perks, but university presidents are smart people and I don't pretend to be able to do their jobs of maximizing institutional reputation at minimum cost better than they can. A 3-year professional degree that eliminates all general educational requirements seems like a pretty damn obvious win though.

The answer to #2 is, I think, yes for most software engineers. Of course there are innumerable examples of brilliant people who become titans without a formal education, but you're making it awfully hard on yourself. I wrote code all through my teenage years before going to college and easily felt things out intuitively, but... let's just say that if there's a version of me out there who dropped out of college after 2 years, I hope I wouldn't hire him/me. And, barring winning the startup jackpot or pivoting to management, the difference in lifetime earnings between someone who really has their shit together and someone who's bringing up Wikipedia at work to try to remember how linked lists work is so wide that the price of a good state school education screams "worth it" to me.

> Of course there are innumerable examples of brilliant people who become titans without a formal education, but you're making it awfully hard on yourself.

Barring the possibility of going back in time to try the experiment, how do you know it's not actually the path you took that's the hard one?

> A 3-year professional degree that eliminates all general educational requirements seems like a pretty damn obvious win though.

Eliminating the only part of a university education that's useful? We already have coding bootcamps and they don't take three years.

If I had to choose between a person (with natural aptitude) who took this 3-year path you describe and the same person, but instead they took only the ~2 years of general education requirements, and spent zero minutes studying engineering in the classroom, I would hire the latter without hesitation.

That's so crazy that I don't even know how to respond to that. How would that part of the university education be useful to a software engineer? And how would it be even more useful than actual CS classes? Is this the nebulous argument about how humanities education makes you a better-rounded person somehow? You have to be trolling, right? Math and CS education make you a better engineer in much more specific ways than learning military history or 18th century English literature or art history or any of the other geneds I had to take.

And this is how we get engineers that think "I don't need to understand economics or history or politics or society or my place in it, I'll just let the people running the company I work for worry about all that so I can focus on important things like optimizing this endpoint".

I would prefer a hiring process that filters out that attitude.

> humanities education makes you a better-rounded person somehow

That's literally what university is for. It sounds like what you wanted was a trade school, and there's nothing wrong with wanting that, but there is still a reason why a university education is valued by some people.

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